FBI chief Comey's actions called into questionIndependent Online
If Hillary Clinton becomes President of the United States, what will she do about the FBI chief she must loathe? Kim Sengupta looks ... This was despite rumours that the Mafia had compromising photographs of him with his alleged lover, his assistant ...and more »

WEBVTT TOMMIE: WE ARE ON SCENE OF A BREAKING SHOOTING WERE TWO POLICE OFFICERS HAVE BEEN SHOT AND KILLED. WE ARE JUST NORTH OF HICKMAN. BEHIND ME, THAT IS WHERE THE SECOND POLICE OFFICER WAS SHOT AT MERLE HAY AND SHERIDAN. THERE APPEARS TO BE A POLICE CAR WITH POSSIBLY THREE BULLET HOLE6 C13 IN THE SIDE DOOR. THE VEHICLE DOES SAY "SERGEANT" ON THE SIDE. OFFICERS RESPONDED TO SHOTS FIRED AROUND 1:00 NEAR 70TH IN AURORA. THE FIRST OFFICER TO ARRIVE FOUND IN REVEREND A POLICE OFFICER WHO HAD BEEN SHOT. DES MOINES POLICE OFFICERS RESPONDED TO A FIT. JUST BEFORE 1:30, A DES MOINES POLICE OFFICER WAS FOUND SHOT AT MERLE HAY AND SHERIDAN. BOTH OFFICERS HAVE DIED. THE SHOOTINGS APPEAR TO BE AN AMBUSH STYLE ATTACK. WHEN KCCI ARRIVED ON SCENE, THERE WERE AT LEAST A DOZEN COP CARS AND WERE OFFICERS WITH ASSAULT RIFLES ON SCENE. RIGHT NOW COP CARS STILL LINE THE STREET AND A COMMAND CENTER HAS JUST ARRIVED. THIS IS A DEVELOPING STORY. TWO POLICE OFFICERS HAVE BEEN SHOT AND KILLED. WE WILL CONTINUE TO STAY ON

Former acting CIA director Mike Morell says he has "deep respect" for FBI Director James Comey but that he "made a series of terrible mistakes."

"I think he was trying to protect his organization," Morell, who backs Hillary Clinton, told David Axelrod in a recent interview for "The Axe Files." "But as (former Attorney General) Eric Holder wrote in The Washington Post over the weekend in response to Comey's actions, people make mistakes. And I think (Comey) made a series of terrible mistakes here."

The full interview is set to publish on November 10.

Comey set off a political firestorm after he sent a letter to lawmakers Friday that said the FBI is reviewing new emails potentially related to its investigation into Clinton's use of a private email server as secretary of state.

He said that Comey handled the situation with the emails in the wrong manner, which has led people to start questioning the "integrity" of the FBI.

"Back in July, when he stood up and said, 'We're not recommending prosecution,' but proceeded to prosecute her publicly, and then went to the Hill a number of occasions and answered a number of questions about this, he went outside the norm," Morell told Axelrod.

"And I think he did it with the intent of protecting his organization and trying to keep his organization out of politics but the effect has been just the opposite. And now people are now questioning his integrity, they're questioning the integrity of the FBI, they're questioning whether this is an independent organization," he said. "I feel sorry for him but he made the wrong decisions here."

Comey has faced criticism not only from Morell and Holder, but Republican former US Attorney Generals Alberto Gonzales and Michael Mukasey, who slammed the way Comey acted, especially with the presidential election looming just days away.

"I've been in situations where you have to make a decision to do your job and that decision has political consequences," Morell said. "And what I've learned is that the best approach is to do it the way you always do it. Whatever the issue is, do it the way you always do it and let the chips fall and always fall back on, look I just did my job, politics in mind, and we did this the normal way. We didn't do anything differently."

Morell left the CIA in 2013 to join Beacon Global Strategies, which is a consulting firm founded by longtime Clinton State Department aide Philippe Reines. Reines isn't a paid campaign official, but he played Republican nominee Donald Trump during Clinton's debate prep.

Four days after James Comey, the F.B.I. director, sent Congress a brief, inscrutable, election-shaking letter about emails that may or may not be new or relevant to the previously concluded investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, his logic makes even less sense than it did on Friday.

He said then that he was obligated to update Congress because he had testified in July that the investigation was complete. It now turns out that he knew nothing about the substance of the emails, which were found during a separate investigation of a computer belonging to Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, one of Mrs. Clinton’s closest aides. And he clearly failed to consider the impact of the innuendo he unleashed just days before the election, seemingly more concerned with protecting himself from recrimination by critics in Congress and the F.B.I. In fact, the investigators had not even obtained a warrant to examine the emails when he fired off the letter; they got the warrant over the weekend.

Now, thanks to Mr. Comey’s breathtakingly rash and irresponsible decision, the Justice Department and F.B.I. are scrambling to process hundreds of thousands of emails to determine whether there is anything relevant in them before Nov. 8 — all as the country stands by in suspense. This is not how federal investigations are conducted. In claiming to stand outside politics, Mr. Comey has instead created the hottest political football of the 2016 election.

The Clinton campaign and its supporters are apoplectic. But top federal law enforcement officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations have been just as swift and fierce in their condemnation of Mr. Comey. The Justice Department, of which the F.B.I. is a part, has a longstanding rule against disclosing inflammatory information to the public and even to Congress about an investigation within 60 days of an election, because that might be seen as influencing the vote.

Eric Holder Jr., the former attorney general, wrote in The Washington Post that Mr. Comey had “committed a serious error with potentially severe implications” and that he had “negatively affected public trust” in the Justice Department and the F.B.I. Alberto Gonzales, who was attorney general under President George W. Bush, said, “To throw out this kind of letter without more information, without really knowing what the facts are with respect to these additional emails, I think was a mistake.”

Richard Painter, President Bush’s top ethics lawyer from 2005 to 2007, went further, saying Mr. Comey’s letter had “very likely” violated a federal law barring public officials from using their position to influence the outcome of an election. In an op-ed essay in The Times, Mr. Painter said he had filed a complaint with the Office of Special Counsel to investigate Mr. Comey’s action.

Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, echoed that charge in a letter to Mr. Comey and also criticized what he labeled a double standard. He has called on the F.B.I. to release information about any investigation into Donald Trump’s ties with the Russian government, too. But that would only compound the damage Mr. Comey has done, violate the Justice Department’s rule and further politicize the F.B.I.

Mr. Comey appears to have grasped the importance of that rule in some contexts. On Monday, CNBC reported that in early October, Mr. Comey fought successfully to keep the F.B.I.’s name off a government report regarding evidence that Russia was attempting to interfere in the presidential election. He believed the report was accurate but did not want to sign on to it so close to the election.

Amid all the noise, it’s worth remembering that even if emails with classified information are found on Mr. Weiner’s computer, that may not change Mr. Comey’s decision, announced in July, to recommend against filing charges against Mrs. Clinton, since the F.B.I. has already determined that she did not intentionally mishandle classified information.

In an election that has featured the obliteration of one long-accepted political or social norm after another, it is sadly fitting that one of the final and perhaps most consequential acts was to undermine the American people’s trust in the nation’s top law enforcement agencies.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s director, James B. Comey, threw that stinging criticism at Hillary Clinton in July, shortly after announcing that the bureau’s long investigation of her handling of classified information had turned up no crime. Now he faces the same judgment from her — and his superiors at the Justice Department.

In hurling barbs at Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Comey has at once revived his reputation for confronting commanders in chief and resurrected the spirit of the F.B.I.’s most infamous high priest. Somewhere, tearing wings off flies in a dark star chamber in the sky, J. Edgar Hoover is smiling. The use of secret information to wound public figures was one of his favorite sports.

The United States has spent many years trying to stand clear of Hoover’s long shadow. But it lengthens in an age of relentless government surveillance and pitiless political publicity. And Mr. Comey has chosen to become a singular force in American politics. His miscalculated decision to unleash his letter to Clinton hunters in Congress looked less like a legal maneuver than an act of political warfare.

The F.B.I. has an essential role in national security and law enforcement, and it also has the awesome power to destroy someone, delivering blows as only the bureau can. It cannot and must not devolve into what it was in the 20th century after the Cold War — a backbiting, bitter, badly led phalanx of spies with guns — or revert to its old role under Hoover as an instrument of political warfare.

Thomas Kean, the Republican chairman of the Sept. 11 commission, concluded more than a decade ago: “We can’t continue in this country with an intelligence agency with the record the F.B.I. has. You have a record of an agency that’s failed, and it’s failed again and again and again.” That is one reason President Obama chose Mr. Comey in 2013: to command and control the F.B.I. under the rule of law.

Yet despite that mandate, the bureau remains the closest thing we have in this country to a secret police. With the barest oversight from lawmakers, Mr. Comey sits at F.B.I. headquarters — the J. Edgar Hoover Building, that crumbling Brutalist parking garage deliberately situated midway between the White House and Congress — playing by his own rules.

Only Mr. Comey can tell us why he went public with a weeks-old investigation into the emails of the Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her estranged husband, a certain ex-congressman (for the record, Anthony Weiner is no relation). But it was immediately clear that Mr. Comey had violated Justice Department protocols in disclosing the case at its earliest stages.

The only explanation I can think of is a barely plausible one, which delves into the terrain of the cheap political thriller, but hews to the twisted plots of this presidential campaign. F.B.I. agents in Washington and New York were frustrated after laboring mightily on the former secretary of state’s handling of classified emails and producing no indictable offense. Mr. Comey, who must flourish or fail by the respect in which his agents hold him, revived the thrill of their chase when a federal case against the aforementioned ex-congressman developed, and now the F.B.I. was on the hunt again. Its agents seized a computer from him; emails from Ms. Abedin were on it.

Were these communiqués classified? Threats to national security? Recipes for risotto or blueprints for building a hydrogen bomb? And what if anything did they reveal about the epistolary endeavors of the former secretary of state and current Democratic nominee for president? The F.B.I. had no idea when Mr. Comey made his remarkable disclosure.

This case is not about personalities. Mr. Comey is not Hoover’s ghost. Nor should it be about politics. The F.B.I. is supposed to be above that. But it is about power, its use and abuse.

Mr. Comey’s reputation for independence in the face of executive power was forged in a 2004 confrontation with President George W. Bush over the widespread and mostly secret warrantless searches of Americans’ emails. When Mr. Comey, then the acting attorney general, found out about it he confronted the president, declared the program illegal, and said he would resign if it were not altered or abolished. He later reflected that it was hard to straddle the tracks in front of a speeding railroad train and yell, “Stop!”

Sadly for many who admired his courage, Mr. Comey now more closely resembles the runaway train. His conduct calls to mind the testimony of another secretary of state, George P. Shultz, in the aftermath of the Iran-contra imbroglio — the disastrous decision by the Reagan administration to sell overpriced weapons to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, skim off the proceeds, and slip millions to rebel cadres in Central America after Congress had cut off its support.

Mr. Shultz said, of the director of central intelligence during the Iran-contra affair, William J. Casey: “The C.I.A. and Bill Casey were as independent as a hog on ice and could be as confident as they were wrong.”

Substitute “the F.B.I. and Jim Comey” and we have a sense of where we are.

In his role as the director of the bureau, Mr. Comey is not supposed to be a Republican or a Democrat. He is supposed to stand as the living embodiment of the statue of Justice — wearing a blindfold, holding a sword in one hand, a balancing scale in the other. In light of his recent conduct, the blindfold and the sword seem intact, but the scale seems to have gone missing. America could use the balance.

FBI director James Comey’s election-eve decision to publicly revive his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server and treatment of classified materials when she was secretary of state has unleashed a torrent of criticism. Here are a series of questions and answers to help understand a complicated legal situation:

Did Comey mess up?

Oh, yes.

In general, prosecutors don’t comment on criminal inquiries unless and until a charge is brought, and there is a separate, long-held policy that, during the last 60 days before an election, the department exercises heightened restraint in an effort to avoid doing anything that might be perceived as political interference with the vote.

In this instance, Comey violated both of those sacrosanct principles. He publicly announced in a letterto Congress that he was rekindling a seemingly completed criminal investigation into whether candidate Hillary Clinton and her staff mishandled classified emails. Worse, he did so without even yet knowing whether a newly discovered trove of emails might simply be duplicates of the thousands he had already pored over and found not worth pursuing. Worst of all, he did it just 11 days before one of the most bitter presidential elections our nation has ever known. So yes, that was a mistake.

More than a 100 former federal prosecutors or Justice Department officials have now criticized Comey, either in a signed statement or in assorted media appearances or op-ed pieces, for having violated these guidelines. They have included former Attorney General Eric Holder (who served under President Barack Obama), former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (George W. Bush), deputy AG George H.W. Terwilliger III (George H.W. Bush), former deputy AG Jamie Gorelick (Bill Clinton), and so on.

The only credible person unassociated with the Donald Trump campaign that I know of who has defended Comey is Dan Richman of Columbia Law School, a former prosecutor who is currently an adviser to Comey.

Did he act out of political bias?

No. None of the 100 or so critics cited above have made such a suggestion and, on the contrary, nearly all have saluted Comey’s integrity. (““Many of us have worked with Director Comey; all of us respect him,” the letter says.) There’s also no evidence Comey supports Trump.

(Some critics have speculated that the savage criticism Comey endured from some Republicans after he decided not to prosecute Hillary Clinton last July could have unconsciously influenced his action this time around, but, obviously, that’s impossible to prove.)

What prompted the inquiry?

The answer is weird and still puzzling at multiple levels.

In pursuing an investigation into whether the disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner was knowingly sexting a minor, prosecutors obtained a search warrant to search several of his electronic devices. On one of those, they found thousands of emails belonging to the email accounts of wife Huma Abedin—from whom he is now estranged. Abedin was, from 2009 to 2013, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department.

During the original inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s emails, Abedin provided investigators with access to her email accounts and to emails stored on three of her electronic devices.

But she had evidently not mentioned then the existence of the device belonging to her husband, which, it turns out, had hundreds of thousands of her emails on it. After Comey publicly announced the revival of the inquiry last Friday, Abedin reportedly told law enforcement and others that she was surprised to learn that her emails were on Weiner’s machine, and that she does not know how they got there. Her attorney told the New York Times, “From the beginning, Ms. Abedin has complied fully and voluntarily with State Department and law enforcement requests, including sitting for hourslong interviews and providing her work-related and potentially work-related documents. . . . While the F.B.I. has not contacted us about this, Ms. Abedin will continue to be, as she always has been, forthcoming and cooperative.”

The fact that this machine’s existence hadn’t previously been disclosed justifies resuscitating the inquiry—but not making the development public.

So why did Comey make his revival of the inquiry public?

He has explained in a letter to FBI employees that he was simply correcting the record and honoring a pledge he had previously made to Congress.

When Comey testified before Congress last July he had told that body that his inquiry into Clinton’s emails had been “completed.” For a lawyer, if you make a statement to a court or other tribunal, and you later discover that the statement is false, or has become false, there’s often a duty to come forward and correct or supplement the record. In Comey’s case, he had not only left Congress with the impression that his inquiry was over, he had also pledged to be transparent with them and to keep them updated (which was, in retrospect, an unwise and unnecessary commitment). That left him in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t spot.

Why is he making all these decisions, instead of Attorney General Loretta Lynch?

Evidently, it all goes back to late June when Bill Clinton—evincing the unerringly poor judgment that we have come to expect of him—decided to pay an impromptu social visit to Attorney General Lynch as their respective planes happened to be parked nearby on the tarmac at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport. Lynch didn’t have the presence of mind to rebuff the former president, notwithstanding that his wife was then under criminal investigation.

Under a firestorm of criticism, she then overreacted. Most AGs would have recused themselves, letting the deputy AG—in this instance, Sally Yates—oversee the probe from that point forward. Strangely, Lynch went further. She not only recused herself, but delegated the decision of whether to prosecute Hillary Clinton to FBI director Comey.

Comey then ran with the discretion Lynch gave him, unexpectedly delivering an unprecedented press conference in July to announce his decision not to pursue charges against Hillary. While doing that, he did something even more unheard of: he took a parting shot at the people he had just elected not to prosecute, characterizing Clinton and her staffers as having been “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

This time around, Comey gave Lynch notice of what he planned to do—notifying Congress of the revival of the investigation just 11 days before the election—giving Lynch and Yates time to beg him not to do it. But they didn’t order him not to do it, and he disregarded their urgings.

Why didn’t Lynch or Yates give him an order?

According to the Washington Post, they balked due to the “institutional power of the FBI director, Comey’s personality and the political realities they were facing.” Basically, they feared the appearances and political consequences of ordering him not to inform Congress.

Did Comey break the law?

I doubt it.

Richard Painter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School who was chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush’s, has argued in the New York Times that Comey has also violated the Hatch Act. That law forbids federal officials from, among other things, using their official positions to influence elections. Painter has actually filed a complaint against Comey with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which enforces that law. (Violations of the Hatch Act carry potential administrative sanctions, including dismissal.) Painter says you can violate the Hatch Act if your actions influence an election, even if that’s not the intent or goal of your action.

Painter’s more qualified than I’ll ever be. Still, I don’t buy it. I can’t believe that by trying to keep his promise to Congress—even if it was a dumb promise and one he never should have made—Comey inadvertently violated the law.

Can Comey be fired?

Yes. FBI directors are appointed by the president to serve 10-year terms, but the president can fire them. (FBI director William Sessions was fired in 1983.)

So far, President Barack Obama has refused even to criticize Comey, however. Perhaps he has not wanted to enter this political mine field, but perhaps he simply still regards Comey as, when all is said and done, a man of integrity who, at worst, made a bad decision in a difficult spot.

After the election, on the other hand, he or a different president might have a different perspective.

FBI chief James Comey has wielded a bullhorn to blare the news (or non-news) about Anthony Weiner's laptop - an announcement that has had the desired effect of pleasing Republicans and tightening the polls. But for some reason (gee, take a guess!), he and his agency refuse to officially discuss whether, or to what extent, they're probing links between Trump and Russia.

That's how the double standard works, folks. If there's a new innuendo about Hillary Clinton, go public with it 11 days before an election. But if there are serious allegations that Donald Trump is a tool of, in cahoots with, or financially beholden to, one of America's top adversaries ... well, in that case, he deserves all the innocent-until-proven-guilty perks that come with investigatory silence.

On Trump and Russia, here's what we've learned in the last day alone:

1. Washington journalist David Corn, a scoop machine best known for breaking the news about Mitt Romney's "47 percent" remarks, has posted a new story that speaks for itself: "A former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence [tells Corn] that in recent months he provided the [FBI] with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump."

Corn has read these memos. The first one says: "Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by Putin, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance." The intelligence officer told Corn that the Kremlin has long been feeding intelligence to Trump's inner circle; in the officer's words, "an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin for mutual benefit ... an extraordinary situation."

So. Is the FBI willing to discuss whether it's looking into any of this? Like the way they went public with vague insinuations about the perv's laptop? Heavens no, the FBI certainly wouldn't want to cast aspersions on the Republican candidate. An FBI spokeswoman told Corn: "Normally, we don't talk about whether we are investigating anything." (I love "normally.")

2. Early this morning, four NBC reporters (the lead reporter is a respected former colleague of mine) broke the news that the FBI is quietly probing ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort's financial ties to Russia. That evidence has been around for awhile — Manafort reportedly earned $12 million working for Putin's Ukraine puppet, Viktor Yanukovych; he's had serious business dealings with Putin oligrachs, one of whom has been linked to organized crime — and Manafort, as campaign chief last summer, was believed to have been instrumental in softening the GOP platform's stance on Russia.

The NBC story quotes David Kramer, a former senior State Department official under George W. Bush: "The relationships that Trump's advisors have had with pro-Russian forces are deeply disturbing. Trump's attitude on Russia is not in line with most Republican foreign-policy thinking. Trump has staked out views that are really on the fringe."

But has Comey blared anything publicly about this probe, in the spirit of pre-election "transparency" (his word, justifying the Clinton announcement)? Nope. No way he wanted to put a cloud over Trump this close to election day. NBC broke its story based on leaks from "law enforcement and intelligence sources." Officially, "the FBI did not comment."

3. Late yesterday afternoon, the website Slate posted a lengthy story about computer scientists who have found something suspicious — "a sustained relationship between a server registered to the Trump Organization and two servers registered to an entity called Alfa Bank." That's a Russian bank headquartered in Moscow. And in September, when The New York Times started to sniff around the story and spoke with Alfa, the Trump Organization promptly shut down the server. The Slate story cautions, "We don't yet know what this [Trump] server was for, but it deserves further explanation."

So is the FBI is looking into any of this? Not a word. Traditional reticence reigns — but only with respect to Trump. He has publicly encouraged the Russians to hack us, and has publicly called for the weakening of our NATO treaty obligations (aligning himself with Putin's fondest wishes). Those moves alone, coupled with the credible allegations of ties to Russia, would appear to the average rational mind to be as dangerous to our national security as the emails in the Weiner household.

But ah yes, the double standard.

Just yesterday — story number 4! — CNBC reported that federal intelligence officials reached a very worrying conclusion back on Oct. 7. They signed off on this statement: "The U.S. intelligence community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of emails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations .... These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process."

In other words, pro-Trump interference.

But take a guess who refused to sign on to the statement. James Comey, of course.

An intelligence source told CNBC that the FBI chief agreed with the statement, "but was against putting it out before the election."

The emails were found on found on a computer seized during an unrelated investigation involving Abedin’s estranged husband, disgraced former New York congressman Anthony Weiner. He is being investigated in connection with online communications with a teenage girl.

In a sworn deposition taken in June as part of a lawsuit filed by the conservative legal group Judicial Watch, Abedin was asked about what devices she had used to send or receive messages from her account on the <a href="http://clintonemail.com" rel="nofollow">clintonemail.com</a> server. As part of the process in 2015 of returning her work-related emails to the State Department, Abedin said she “looked for all the devices that may have any of my State Department” work and provided two laptops and a Blackberry to her lawyers for review.

Abedin made no mention of there being additional devices where her emails might have been saved.

If the FBI finds emails Abedin sent or received through the <a href="http://clintonemail.com" rel="nofollow">clintonemail.com</a> server archived on the device recently recovered from her home, that would appear to conflict with what she told the FBI earlier this year.

In an April interview, Abedin told FBI agents that after she left the State Department in 2013, Clinton’s staff transitioned to a different email server and she “lost most of her old emails as a result.” She said she had only accessed her <a href="http://clintonemail.com" rel="nofollow">clintonemail.com</a> account through a web portal and that she “did not have a method for archiving her old emails prior to the transition.”

A person familiar with the investigation said the device that appears to be at the center of the new review belonged only to Weiner and was not a computer he shared with Abedin. As a result, it was not a device Abedin searched for work-related emails at the time of the initial investigation, according to the person, who said of Abedin that it was “news to her” that her emails would be on a computer belonging to her husband.

The FBI has discovered a trove of thousands of emails and has obtained a warrant to search the messages related to the Clinton investigation. It’s not clear how many emails might be considered relevant to the probe or what significance, if any, they might have.

It’s also not clear how long the additional email review will take or whether the process will be done by Election Day.

The official who spoke to the AP was not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.

FBI Director James Comey revealed the existence of the emails in a remarkable and ambiguous letter to Congress on Friday. The notification, two weeks before the election, came over the objections of Justice Department officials and drew scathing criticism from former prosecutors and Democrats in Congress.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said he would not defend or criticize Comey’s decision, but noted that Comey was in a “tough spot.” Comey has said he felt compelled to alert Congress after having already told lawmakers that the investigation was concluded.

Even if the recovered emails are found to contain classified information, it’s not clear what impact that would have on the investigation. Comey has already described Clinton and her aides as “extremely careless” and has said agents found scores of classified emails on Clinton’s server.

But he also said there was no evidence they intended to mishandle classified information or obstructed justice, elements he suggested would be necessary for a prosecution.

The Justice Department, moving to address concerns over the timing of the revelation of the emails and a potential post-election spillover, said Monday it would “dedicate all necessary resources” to promptly concluding the review of the new emails.

A former senior intelligence officer, who specialised in Russian counterintelligence, told Mother Joneshe has provided the FBI with information gathered from Russian sources which contends the Russian Government has attempted for years to cultivate or compromise Donald Trump into an asset.

There are also rumours, not substantiated, that Russia has pretty hefty blackmail material on Trump.

Reid has demanded the link between Trump and Russia be investigated as various news outlets, including NBC and Yahoo news have reported that the FBI are probing links between the Republican presidential nominee’s allies and the Russian government.

Clinton caught between a Weiner and a hard placeToronto Sun
Incredibly, the FBI found some 650,000 emails on the computer Weiner shared with his wife, with metadata on the device reportedly indicating that thousands of emails were sent to and from the private server that Clinton used while Secretary of State.and more »

Weiner-Abedin Laptop Focus of New Clinton Email InquiryWall Street Journal
The FBI is searching through 650,000 emails found on Anthony Weiner's laptop that may or may not relate to the case of Hillary Clinton's mishandling of classified information. What are the questions they hope to answer before election day? WSJ's Jason ...and more »

The FBI will inspect some 650,000 emails found on a laptop belonging to disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner that may be relevant to an investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday night.

The Journal cited sources familiar with the investigation to say that metadata within the messages suggested that thousands could have been sent to or from Clinton's private email server.

The messages were uncovered after investigators seized devices they suspected Weiner, the estranged husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin, of using to exchange sexually explicit texts with underage girls.

The investigation into Clinton's private email server was completed in July, with James Comey, the FBI director, recommending that no criminal charges be brought against Clinton for her use of the server while she was secretary of state. But in a vague letter released Friday to congressional leaders, Comey announced the discovery of more emails "that appear to be pertinent" to the Clinton investigation.

The bureau came under fire over the weekend after a Washington Post report revealed that agents had known about the emails since early October but chose not to tell Comey about them until less than two weeks before the presidential election.

Developments over the weekend have laid bare internal strife both within the FBI and between the FBI and the Justice Department in multiple inquiries involving Clinton.

James Comey, the FBI director, at a hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on July 7 in Washington, DC.Alex Wong/Getty Images

The Justice Department reportedly asked the FBI not to disclose the discovery of the emails to Congress so close to the November 8 election, but Comey wrote to his employees on Friday that he felt "an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed."

Some within the FBI have apparently considered Comey to have overshared various aspects of the Clinton investigation with lawmakers and the public; in July the director gave an unprecedented press conference to announce that the FBI would not recommend criminal charges in the case.

Agents were also frustrated with the FBI leadership's apparent lack of interest in aggressively investigating the Clinton Foundation for possible conflicts of interest and financial crimes, according to The Journal.

The foundation's controversial donation practices came under renewed scrutiny last week when WikiLeaks published a hacked memo titled "Bill Clinton, Inc." that raised questions about the blurring of lines between the charity and the Clintons' personal finances.

Post Politics

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UK Government was handed dossier on Donald Trump links to Russia last year, court papers reveal: it covers "at least" five years of communication, co-operation and conspiracy between Mr Trump's camp and Russian intelligence officials." | See also: 1.13.17 - Former MI6 agent Christopher Steele's frustration as FBI sat on Donald Trump Russia file for months | UK was given details of alleged contacts between Trump campaign and Moscow - The Guardian: A statement by Steele's defence lawyers, endorsed by the former MI6 agent, said Orbis was hired between June and November last year by Fusion GPS, a Washington-based research consultancy to look into Trump's links with Russia. In that period, Steele ...

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The Snake Pit, Part 2: 4.4 - 1.17

Updates on the Investigations of Foreign Interference in 2016 US Presidential Elections - Part 2 - April 4 to 1, 2017

The Snake Pit, Part 1: 3.31.17 and prior articles: The FBI "investigation" is indeed, "absurd"...

Not because it is unjust or unjustified, but because it is grossly inadequate - Investigation of Foreign Interference in 2016 US Presidential Elections - Part 1 - March 2017

Just Security

Defense One - All Content

US national security | The Guardian

National Security - WaPo

www.washingtontimes.com stories: Security

Howl!

The America of my dreams: Shattered. Raped.

Mohammed and The Great Twin Peak Mountain

But maybe there is the third option: both the Mountain and Mohammed might start inching towards each other, in a slow Middle Eastern dance, under the excited accompaniment of tamburins and harmonicas by their neighbors and other Mountains. Maybe, if we try to push all the right buttons...

"I will call him" "Ishmael"

The Global and The US Domestic Terrorism Incidents, The Mass Shooting Incidents, and The Incidents of Shooting at the U.S. Police Officers: Comparisons and The Illustrations for The Statistical Analysis - The Brinsley's Jacket

Omar Mateen and 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting - The Dots, The Darkness, and The Mirrors, part 2

Quotes and Questions for Investigations

THE DARKNESS OF THE LOWLY TRUTHS

9/11 and Russia – connecting the dots - by Michael Novakhov

FBI on a couch: problems and solutions: FBI as a domestic intelligence service

The American KGB and the Comey's visions: can Hoover's COINTELPRO thugs be transformed into the modern counterintelligence officers? | M.N.: The American KGB wants to take over the US government. Oy, gevalt! Maybe, it is the time to order a ticket to Madagascar.. - Quotes and Comments

What is wrong with the FBI?

The Kiryas Joel affair: "Sexual abuse" or FBI abuse? | Michael Ameri's suicide as a protest against the FBI: What is wrong with the FBI: its strategy, tactics, techniques and methods if they lead to these unexpected and tragic results?

Kiryas Joel: "Sexual abuse" or FBI abuse?

Is there a general attempt to mislead and to manipulate the FBI using the issues of sexual abuse as a pretext, as a way to deal with the political and other opponents?

Investigate the "investigators"! Part 2: FBI as "a high church for the true mediocre"

The World and Security Review

The U.S. and Global Security Review

The Panama Papers: Revealed: the $2bn offshore trail that leads to Vladimir Putin - The Guardian

How to hide a billion dollars | The Panama Papers – YouTube

Russia's Withdrawal from Syria

M.N.: Did "Putin get exactly what he wanted in Syria?" Not "exactly". | "For Russia to continue would have meant increased military costs and lives. Russia already has lost military personnel, including at least one general. This intervention, most probably never intended to be long-term, may have become short-term in the face of even incremental increased U.S. and allied assistance." - Putin Got Exactly What He Wanted in Syria - Defense One

The New "Unholy Alliance" or The "New World Order"? - Russia, China, Iran and Latin America

“They operate deliberately in the Western Hemisphere as part of their broader global strategies. The most concerning of them is Russia, which portrays the United States in our theater as unreliable and as withdrawing from this pivotal region,” Tidd said. Security in the Western Hemisphere connects directly to other parts of the world, the admiral said. “Smuggling networks run through South America directly into our homeland [and] foreign terrorist fighters flow from the Caribbean to Syria and to Iraq,” Tidd added. As part of its global strategy, he said, Russia tries to discredit U.S. reliability as a trustworthy partner in the United States’ own region. “These issues transcend artificial boundaries and demand a transregional, united response,” the admiral said. | "Iran’s growing influence in the region—and its effort to exert influence over governments there—has fostered pressing security concerns as the Iranians inch closer to the United States’ southern border, according to these U.S. officials and Latin American leaders, who met for several days this week at a summit organized by the Israel Allies Foundation (IAF)... Iran is becoming increasingly open about its presence in Latin America and providing its officials with passports from Venezuela and other countries, giving them free rein to travel throughout South America. Iran has forged close ties with countries such as Argentina, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, among others." - Iran Steps Up Covert Action in Latin America - Web and News Review

The Case Of Litvinenko, The Trails Of Polonium, And The Islamic Terrorism As a Russian False Flag

Russia and Ukraine News Review

Israel News Review

Middle East News

The Mysterious Life And Death Of Igor Sergun, The Chief Of The GRU - Russian Military Intelligence

"I’m frankly unsure how to feel about his death. As a career U.S. Army military intelligence officer, and our senior military attaché to Russia from 2012 to 2014, I met with General Sergun and his staff several times for extended periods. I found him soft-spoken, unassuming, complex, erudite and nuanced. And I learned that even as Sergun relentlessly directed global intelligence operations against our interests, he — paradoxically — also viewed constant confrontation with the U.S. and West as not in Russia’s best long-term interest." - Death of the GRU Commander - by Peter Zwack - from "Defense One" | Igor Sergun - News and Web Review

Investigate the "investigators"! FBI as "a high church for the true mediocre"

"At bottom, I mean profoundly at bottom, the FBI has nothing to do with Communism, it has nothing to do with catching criminals, it has nothing to do with the Mafia, the syndicate, it has nothing to do with trust-busting, it has nothing to do with interstate commerce, it has nothing to do with anything but serving as a church for the mediocre. A high church for the true mediocre." Norman Mailer | "Investigate the "investigators"! I would think that no less than 50% of the problems this country is facing is due to the FBI's inadequacy. This is a very important issue and the time has come to address it." - by Michael Novakhov